FTSE 100 smashes intra day high as investors call Trump’s bluff
The FTSE 100 surpassed its all-time high on Thursday with investors unfazed by the latest barrage of trade threats from President Donald Trump.
The UK’s flagship index rallied over one per cent in morning trading to over 8,970. This topped a previous intra-day record of 8,908.82 set on March 3.
Miners pioneered Thursday’s jump with Anglo American up over four per cent and Rio Tinto and Glencore over three per cent. Copper prices reached record levels after a 13.25 per cent jump to near $5.50 a per pound on Wednesday, which came as Trump flirted with 50 per cent tariffs on the metal.
WPP rose over two per cent after naming ex-Microsoft executive Cindy Rose as its new chief.
The blue-chip index sealed a record closing high of 8,892.36 in June after a rebound from Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’. Should the index maintain its gains, it will be set to top the record high.
FTSE shrugs off trade worries
Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: ‘’The Footsie is footloose, shrugging off trade worries to dance to an all-time high. Even a fresh volley of tariff letters from President Trump has failed to knock investors’ sentiment.”
Markets have coined the term ‘TACO’ to describe the White House’s trade offensive, referring to ‘Trump Always Chickens Out.’
Streeter said: “The FTSE 100 is stuffed full of multinationals which are sensitive to the outlook for the world economy and with the so-called ‘TACO trade’ in full swing, it’s benefiting from more optimism around. Investors expect that Trump will ‘chicken out’ from imposing his threat.”
Elsewhere, the sentiment spread across Europe with Germany’s DAX hitting a new peak. The DAX, which tracks the 40 largest Frankfurt-listed firms, was up 0.3 per cent to 24,619.
Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said: “European markets in general continue to shrug off Donald Trump’s daily tariff updates, perhaps seeing them as noise and not facts. Trump is throwing out numbers left, right and centre, and investors have begun to dismiss anything that isn’t set in stone.”
On London’s mid-cap FTSE 250 a bumper takeover from Jupiter helped the index jump 0.3 per cent.
Jupiter soared nearly 13 per cent after announcing its takeover of the UK’s largest asset manager for non-profits CCLA.